The recent violent protest at the American consulate in Baghdad and the US airstrike attack that subsequently killed top Iranian military general Qassim Soleimani in Iraq have severely renewed the hostility between Tehran and Washington.
With it is a serious risk of an escalation into a disastrous warfare.
The unproportional and unguarded military action from the US has come as a shocker to many people and countries around the world since it was launched without disclosure of any legal justification and rationale behind it.
Again, the airstrike attack essentially went counter to a 2016 key election promise of President Donald Trump to not start a new war and instead put focus on winding up all the ongoing US battles since they were humanly and materially costly to Washington.
The fulfillment of this promise would have been a nice presidential departure from the established American foreign policy tradition since 1930s under Franklin Roosevelt that seems to prefer wars and foreign military interventions as the way to feel and appear " more presidential" as a US President.
The Muslim world has been America's and Western theatre of war for decades, with no much of an outcome except breeding more chaos and destruction that catastrophically created the ground for the sprouting of al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Sadly, instead of learning from this visible chaos and blowbacks of America and Western foreign policies in the Islamic world today, some war hawks are still justifying why it should continue using the bogus Huntington thesis of the Clash of Civilizations between the West and Islam.
There are those who feel that the Friday decision by President Trump to attack Iran was a selfish tool for wagging the dog away from his impeachment crisis with a view of boosting his dampened popularity ahead of his reelection bid this year.
There have also been questions about the possible role of Israel and Saudi Arabia in influencing the attack given that America largely does their biddings in the Middle East.
However, as I earlier noted, the bigger picture is not even whether the US had a justified cause for revenge or not, but whether the world can afford a fresh war in the new decade considering the darkness that already exists in the Middle East region and beyond due to devastating bloodsheds.
Major global leaders should move in to help in cooling off the tensions between America and Iran and push for restraint, and informed and sober diplomatic engagements between the two countries that have a history of bitter-sweet diplomatic rapport.
Mohamed is a social-political commentator in Garissa town.
Email: [email protected]
